


Time Will Crawl

by coldhope



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-11-14
Updated: 2014-11-14
Packaged: 2018-02-25 07:29:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2613425
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coldhope/pseuds/coldhope
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Inspired by one of <a href="http://kaciart.tumblr.com/post/100365829238">kaciart's</a> amazing drawings: the Winter Soldier faced with a pre-serum Steve Rogers and--conversely--1940s Bucky Barnes coming home to find Captain America lurking in the kitchen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Like another story of mine, this one sprang into being almost as soon as I saw the picture. Many thanks to kaciart for permission to go on messing around with it :D

Afterwards, of course, it was determined exactly what went wrong and where and who was to blame. The fact that the answer to all three questions had to do with a world that didn't happen to be Earth kind of limited the scope for political spin, and the demand for a public apology from Asgard was somewhat drowned out by the hearings on Capitol Hill regarding the mess in the Potomac and the state of international intelligence. 

At the time, though, all anybody knew was that at half past eleven on a Wednesday morning the world went suddenly and blindingly blue-white, and everything that relied on a computer to tell the date and time stopped working for the space of five whole minutes. Five minutes was a lot, in the world of communications technology. Five minutes scared the shit out of the people who had access to launch-code keys. Especially while a lot of bullets were flying around in the nation's capitol and Project Insight was about to engage.

Then the networks came back online, slowly at first, taking up the load, and then faster and faster once connections had begun to be made. Traffic lights relit, blinking red and amber over intersections that were now full of honking crumpled cars. Air traffic controllers let go of their finger-denting grip on the edges of their consoles and rattled out queries and commands as fast as any auctioneer. A million customer-service representatives were reconnected to what was now a world-record-breaking queue of pissed-off people on hold. S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters' war room lit up all at once, monitors flaring with information, communications channels reopened. The hunt for Captain Rogers was back on.

And in the streets of two cities, in two times, something did _not_ go back where and when it was supposed to. 

_Brooklyn, 1942:_

_He was still blazing with adrenaline from the astonishing fight with the Winter Soldier--still stunned by the revelation of that face, those eyes--and at first he thought it was another attack, they'd set off some kind of bomb, killing Fury wasn't bad enough, they had to set off a goddamn_ bomb _in the middle of the nation's capital with God knew how many civilians at risk. Then his vision had cleared, and it was...wrong._

_The colors were different, for one thing. No bright neon hues from advertisements, no LED signs. And the sounds were different, but familiar, so familiar. Car engines hadn't sounded like that for a very long time, had they? And the city around him had changed, it wasn't...it wasn't Washington, he'd know this skyline anywhere, but not anywhen. He was...back. A lifetime ago. Before the war, before the serum, before everything. He was in Brooklyn._

_And...he looked down at himself, still in the khakis and jacket he'd been wearing on the bridge in DC, the shield on his left arm..._ he _was the anachronism, here._

_All this went through his mind in the space of a few seconds, as he picked himself up off the concrete, and then his body took charge and made him jump out of the way of a yellow cab with its horn blaring. Oh. He was in the middle of the street. And people were staring at him._

_Steve ran, not knowing where the hell he was heading. Anywhere not in the middle of a busy street. Anywhere he could stop and try to figure out what had just happened to him, and what the hell he was going to do next._

Washington DC, 2014:

Everything hurt. More than usual. 

He could remember just a bright, searing flash and then an awful dizzying sense of being _twisted_ somehow, and now there were people yelling and cars honking and he was lying on his side on something hard, and he thought _oh, hell, did I pitch a fit again, please don't let me have pitched a goddamn fit in the middle of the street,_ but the voices and the car horns were too close for him to give that one even the hint of hope. 

It had been a bad week, he'd thought he was over one cold when another one gleefully decided to take its place and he'd been feverish and shivering all day, dreading having to hide it from Bucky when he got home in the evening. His chest had taken on that hot compressed feeling it got when he was in for a bad go-round with bronchitis, and wasn't _that_ just fucking dandy, that'd be twice in one month and he didn't have the spare cash to _not_ work through it. 

_Too bad_ , he thought, and struggled to sit up, opening his eyes: his vision was blurry, the sweat-damp hair hanging over his face making it hard to see anything at all. Things...sounded weird. Sometimes he got that with ear infections, but then it was generally a sort of flattened dimness across everything: the sounds weren't flattened, just _wrong_ somehow, unfamiliar. 

He hurt all over and his breathing sounded frankly gross even to him, and as he pushed the hair out of his face and blinked painfully up into the brightness of the day something blocked out the sun. Someone. Someone in...in...strange dark clothing, close-fitting black trousers with pockets all over them, and a strange leather jacket that had one arm, the other being some sort of shimmery silver stuff. Someone with...

Someone with no face. 

Steve stared up into the apparition's lack of eyes, feeling the shock drop into his stomach and tighten sharply and unmercifully in his chest: almost at once he couldn't breathe, his hand uselessly plucking at the collar of his shirt, his attempts at inhaling nothing more than high screechy gasps. Oh, this was bad, this was a really bad one, and the visceral terror that came with the asthma began to overtake his fright at the thing standing over him. He was so focused on the struggle to breathe that he barely noticed when the monster slung the weapon in its hands back on a shoulder-strap and knelt down, bringing its no-face closer to his; then it went away entirely as he closed his eyes and tried not to panic. 

Then someone put an arm like an iron bar round his shoulders, and he was lifted as if he weighed nothing at all. Steve's mind, confused and frantic, searched for memories, and came up with the time the previous winter when he'd collapsed in the snow and Bucky had found him, Bucky had lifted him like a child and carried him through the winter to somewhere warm and smelling of carbolic, telling him over and over that he would be okay, that he'd be just fine. Lying in Bucky's arms, his head resting against Bucky's shoulder, he had let himself believe that he was safe. The memories crosspatched: he had been, he was being carried, held against somebody's chest, his feet dipping and bobbing with the rhythm of their steps. He still couldn't breathe, but at least he wasn't alone, and he curled his arm round his bearer's neck and rested his face against hard leather and webbing straps and let go of everything else for a while. 

~

Washington DC, 2014: this is his mission. This is his mission but the parameters have changed in a way that does not fit with any of the protocols in the Soldier's available memory. He knows that the mission is still active because he has not been recalled, but the target he has been sent to eliminate is no longer present. Instead there is...this boy, ragged-thin and burning with fever, struggling to breathe. The dark-gold hair is the same, and the face. 

_Who the hell is Bucky?_

The target had called him by a name, just before...whatever that had been. Sunlight on his face. The mask lying empty and useless on the ground, and the target staring at him, shocked openmouthed and still. Time stretched. Then the blue light, and the feeling of having been also somehow _physically_ stretched, coming back to himself, like thawing out, confused, scrabbling for the familiarity of mask and goggles once again. And now the target is...different.

 _Who are you?_ he thinks. 

And somewhere in the dim depths of the part of his mind the Soldier does not voluntarily delve into, memories have begun to make their long slow way to the surface. Pallid and unspeakable, like pieces of the drowned dead, but just as inevitable in their eventual rise. 

He lifts the unknown/mission target, as carefully as he might pick up unexploded munitions, the chaos of a botched operation all around him, and looks around for somewhere relatively safe to use as temporary cover.

~

_I know a government man_  
 _He was as blind as the moon_  
 _He saw the sun in the night_  
 _He took a top-gun pilot and he_  
 _He made him fly through a hole_  
 _Till he grew real old_  
 _And he never came down_  
 _He just flew till he burst_  
\--David Bowie

Brooklyn, 1942:

He hadn't realized how used he'd been to people recognizing Captain America as just part of the world, nothing particularly new or unfamiliar about the shield with its single vast star. But he was back now, back before the USO cheerleading, back before anybody got his stupid jingle stuck in their heads, before he'd been a trademark. 

Steve remembered something Stark had once said to him: _you go around with an actual target strapped to your back, Rogers. That thing's a bullseye, it literally conveys the message "shoot me right here, win valuable prizes."_ Nobody was shooting at him, but _everybody_ was staring. Logistics began to add up: he needed to find out what the hell year it was and what had happened, he needed somewhere to hide, he needed...

The stack of problems to be solved loomed over him higher and higher like a cresting wave, threatening to overwhelm Steve entirely. He leaned against the wall in an alley, panting. The sense of dislocation, of being in two times at once, was strong enough to make him slightly nauseated. He knew where he was, a set of old memories had suddenly been dragged out of cold storage and kicked into action, but the part of him that hadn't lived in Brooklyn for seventy goddamn years was having trouble with landmarks. Closing his eyes helped a bit. _Okay, if that's Flatbush and I'm on Front then..._

...then he was only a few blocks away from the apartment he'd shared with Bucky. There were a number of reasons why he was leery of going there, but the sheer instinct to hide somewhere familiar, somewhere that fit at least some of the description of _home_ , grabbed him by the hindbrain and set him moving. 

Whatever luck had been with him so far was still in play, because the spare key was where he remembered it, and he let himself in without anyone shouting _Hey, you with the big shield thing, who the hell are you?_

Stepping into their old apartment was like stepping into memory: everything was the way he remembered it, every detail down to the worn linoleum and the chipped enamel on the stovetop. Steve very gently set the shield down on the kitchen table, and dropped into a chair--which creaked alarmingly--and closed his eyes. 

It had to be the Tesseract. Unless it was something to do with that...weird energy, whatever it had been...that Thor and Selvig and Jane Foster had been dealing with, the stuff that had done funky things to time and space, but he was pretty sure they'd cleared that up. No, this _felt_ like the Tesseract, somehow, there was a familiar kind of headache associated with its manifestations that he could identify by now. 

He scrubbed his hands down his face, able to think more clearly now that fight-or-flight had mostly been dealt with, and looked over at the calendar on the wall. Same month, at least. April, 1942.

 _1942,_ he thought. _What was I doing in 1942?_

Trying to get into the damn Army, that's what. He'd been trying ever since December of '41. It wouldn't be until next June that he'd meet Erskine and be recruited into Project Rebirth. Which...presumably he was still going to do, because he, Steve, was still Captain America, but...if he'd already had the serum, who the hell were they going to shoot it into next June? And what had happened to the version of him who actually belonged to this time?

Oh, God, what if _that_ Steve had gotten dropped into 2014? The last thing he could remember before the blue flash was staring into the eyes of the Winter Soldier, who had been making a sincere and concerted effort to kill him, and being struck by astonished recognition. The last time he'd seen that face had been on a train in Austria, seventy years earlier, falling away, falling beyond his reach. 

Even with all his strength and speed and skill, Captain America had only just managed to avoid the Winter Soldier's lethal knives, only barely got the upper hand. 95-pound asthmatic Steve would have no chance at all. 

_I wonder if that version of me dies in 2014 if I'll stop existing here,_ he thought. _Just wink out of existence as if I'd never been. Which I wouldn't have, because if I die before I get the serum then nothing Captain America ever did would have happened at all._

Trying to puzzle out the cause-and-effect loops made his head throb queasily, and he gave it up. Compartmentalize, Fury had said. Okay: there was nothing he could do right now about the time issue, and if he was going to stop existing as a result, then it wasn't as if anything he could do would prevent it, and anyway everything seemed to blur into irrelevance every time the memory of cold blue-grey eyes flashed back into his head. It had been Bucky. Of that he had absolutely no doubt at all. But a Bucky so changed, who had looked right at him with no recognition, a Bucky who had...if Natasha was to be believed, and he knew she was...been responsible for God knew how many assassinations over the past _fifty years_.

 _What did they do to you, Buck?_ he asked, miserably, inside his own head. _What did they do to you? Where did you go?_

1945, in the cockpit of the _Valkyrie_ , pointing the nose down. Bucky was dead, Bucky had fallen from the train and Steve couldn't catch him, and there were absolutely no decisions left to be made, no question at all of what he had to do. He'd been smiling, a very little, when they went into the ice. 

_I didn't come for you,_ he thought. _I didn't come back for you. I'm so sorry._

He folded his arms, rested his face in them, using the shield as a pillow, and reflected that he had never in his life felt so alone. 

~

Washington DC, 2014:

At least he wasn't alone. 

Steve wasn't at all sure _why_ he was hallucinating a much older Bucky with a really cool metal arm and an awful lot of extra hair, but it was better than no company at all. He knew he must have gotten himself good and sick this time, because he only got delirious enough to see stuff that wasn't there when he was _really_ unwell, but for whatever reason he didn't seem to be feeling as bad as he usually did at this stage. 

Imaginary Bucky didn't talk much. That was okay. Steve was having to put enough effort into breathing: carrying on conversations was an extra load on top of that. Also, Imaginary Bucky didn't like being called Bucky. Steve didn't mind that either. He could remember, the last time he'd had pneumonia, arguing heatedly with Mickey Mouse about what "Minnie" was short for; hallucinations had their weird little ways. 

It had been a relief when the mask and goggles came off, because the no-face thing had really been upsetting him. In the dream Imaginary Bucky had carried him somewhere--there had been a lot of walking--and set him down on something soft, and when he started paying attention to his surroundings again, he found that they were in a smallish shabby room that had _cheap hotel_ written all over it. His imagination was getting really specific these days. Steve had blinked up at the terrifying apparition looming over him, and then gasped when the apparition took off its lack of face to reveal James Buchanan Barnes wearing an astonishing scowl. The gasp had set off a fit of miserably painful coughing, and Steve curled up into a knot and stopped being able to pay attention to anything other than wondering if he'd ever be able to breathe again. When it was finally over, he blinked the tears out of his eyes to realize something heavy and warm was wrapped around his shoulders, something like a leather jacket covered in straps.

There were a lot of straps. And it smelled weird. But it was warm, and it was Bucky's, and he pulled the jacket closer.

That had been a while ago. He was never sure about how time passed when he was dreaming like this. Now Imaginary Bucky was bending over him again, saying something. He tried to listen, but it was like a bad radio signal, static washing through the words, taking away their meaning. Steve marveled at the way light gleamed in his hair, attempting to fix it in his mind so he could try drawing it later. He could do it in charcoal, with a white pencil to catch the shimmer of the light. The contrast would be beautiful. His eyes slipped closed, thinking about rich sooty black charcoal. 

More static trying to form words, and then something smooth and wonderfully cool touched his forehead, his cheek. Steve turned his face against the coolness, greedy for more. After a moment it shaped itself to fit against him, like a hand cupping his cheek, and he sighed a little. "'s nice," he said, or tried to say. "Don't stop."

Definitely words, but he couldn't understand them. The cadence was all wrong. Dream language. He was so confused, and everything hurt, and wasn't he dreaming Bucky was there? Steve wanted him terribly, wanted to wake up and find Bucky sprawled in the chair beside his bed, like he always was. 

It was a relief when everything went away for a little while.


	2. Chapter 2

_You were a talented child_  
 _You came to live in our town_  
 _We never bothered to scream_  
 _When your mask came off_  
\--David Bowie

Brooklyn, 1942:

Steve wasn't sure how much time had passed--ha, time, yes, hilarious--before he heard the scratching of a key in the lock and sat bolt upright, adrenaline thumping him in the chest. Oh, God. Bucky. That was Bucky and he was going to have to find some way of explaining what the hell had happened to him and where he'd gone, which was a problem since Steve still had absolutely no idea who was pulling the strings and how long this state of affairs was likely to go on. 

He sat frozen in the shadow, seeing again the mental picture of the Winter Soldier, pale and cold-eyed, so vivid it seemed to give him glowing afterimages printed on the darkness. 

The kitchen door stuck the way it always stuck when the weather was damp, and he heard a muffled curse through the wood. Then Bucky gave the doorknob its practiced tug as he turned the key, and late afternoon light splashed across the linoleum, outlining a silhouette.

"Stevie," he called. "You home? I got groceries." Then a mutter, something that sounded like _better not be gettin' sick again_ , and Bucky closed the door behind him and turned to put his bags down on the table and stopped, absolutely still. 

Steve could see white all the way round his irises. Vaguely he was impressed that Bucky hadn't dropped their week's rations all over the floor; he looked almost as pale as he had in 2014 when that mask came off and the world ground to a stuttering, off-balance halt, but he was standing perfectly still and his hands were steady.

"Steve?" he said, soft, wondering. Hearing that name again, from those lips, was not something Steve had ever, ever expected, and his chest went painfully tight.

"Um. Yeah. Hi?"

"Ho-leee shit," Bucky breathed, eyes travelling from his face to the rest of him and slowly back up. "Steve, what the...what the hell happened, what..." 

Now Bucky did set the bag down on the counter, not the table, still not within arm's reach, and pushed both hands through his hair, which stood up in all directions. "You got...bigger."

"Yeah," he said again, aware of how dumb it sounded. "I did. It's...complicated, Buck."

"And you got _older_ ," Bucky said, still staring at him with wide, astonished eyes. "This morning you were about yay high and going on twenty-four, so...did you eat extra Wheaties for lunch or what?" Now he did come over, and Steve was achingly, terribly aware of how familiar everything about him was, how the sharp angles at the corners of his mouth softened into the curve of his lips, how the light caught the lines of nose and cheekbone the way he'd always known, always drawn over and over in his head. He could hardly breathe, and wondered somewhere in the back of his head if he'd gotten the asthma back again with this unscheduled jaunt into the past. 

Then he yelped, because Bucky had just poked him in the bicep. "Hey!"

"Ho-lee _shit_ ," Bucky said again, slow and wondering, and gave him another prod. "You're real. All this. Real. Fuckin' hell, Stevie, you...you filled out pretty good."

Hearing actual admiration in that voice was something he'd never quite admitted daydreaming about, even to himself. He cleared his throat with an effort. "Quit poking me. It's...complicated, like I said. I'm not supposed to be here."

Bucky ignored the command. "Seriously, what happened to you?"

"I joined the army," he said, shortly. "Like I always wanted to. And before you ask, yeah, it hurt, and yeah, it's...it's permanent, at least it was. I'm not from this _time_ , Buck. All this isn't due to happen to me till next summer."

Bucky seemed to be much more interested in the end results than in the procedure responsible for them. "What happens next summer?"

"I eat my Wheaties," he said. "Or somebody else's Wheaties. It's...it's a program designed to make ordinary guys into super-soldiers. It worked, once."

"Steve Rogers the super-soldier," Bucky said. 

"No, um." He sighed, feeling his face go pink, and reached out to tap the shield on the table with a fingertip. "Actually it's _Captain America_ the super-soldier."

Bucky stared from him to the beat-up red-white-and-blue of the shield, and then cracked up in helpless laughter. 

~

It took a while before Bucky could stop snickering, and after Steve's initial huffy reaction he'd unwound enough to admit that he had a theme song as well, which--when he sang the first verse--reduced Bucky to tearful incoherence. "Stop," he gasped, arms wrapped around his ribcage. "Stop, fuck, Stevie, you're killin' me, oh my God, fuckin' _star spangled man with a plan_ , I can't breathe..."

"Consider it payback," Steve said, conscious of a certain upwelling of illogical glee himself. Sure, everything was all wrong and upside-down and he was probably going to pop out of existence whenever the Winter Soldier got around to unscrewing little-Steve's head back in the twenty-first century, but...but right now, just now, just this moment, he was with Bucky and everything was just a tiny little bit perfect. "Wanna see my knocking-out-Hitler punch? It's pretty famous. Done it over two hundred times."

Bucky had been at the wiping-eyes-and-panting stage and that set him off again, and when he collapsed against Steve's shoulder and Steve curled his arm around him it seemed quite natural, quite ordinary, to tug Bucky down into his lap the way he had never, ever, ever actually dared to do. 

 

Washington DC, 2014:

This is not his field. 

His field is making people dead, or more correctly eliminating targets with maximum efficiency. He is very probably the best in the world, or at least in the top five, with throwing knives; he can put a round through a target at ranges that would make most snipers blanch. He knows at least thirty ways of killing somebody with objects easily found on an office desk, and that's not even using the advantage of the metal hand. 

He is, however, absolutely no good at dealing with people who do _not_ currently require termination but apparently _do_ require physical maintenance. His own maintenance and repair is conducted while he is in the chair preparing for cryofreeze, and during cryo itself: all he knows about the business is that there are needles that go into his veins and substances flow into and out of him through glisteny coils of tubing. He hasn't got any needles or tubing, and if he did he wouldn't know what to put in them. 

His...not-target is behaving very strangely. For one thing, he had called him the same name his actual mission target had used, on the bridge: it's not a name he remembers, not exactly, but it brings on a sort of vague shadowing in the back of his head, like a thundercloud beginning to mass on the horizon. For another, the not-target seems to be having some serious trouble with his breathing, and according to the Winter Soldier's programmed parameters he is noticeably above normal human baseline temperature. 

All of this is confusing and makes him angry because he is not used to being confused, it is not a state with which he is familiar, and he wishes the blue light would come back and return things to the way they had been: his target, himself, and any number of sharp things and projectile weapons. Instead he finds himself staring down at the curled, shivering form on the bed--wrapped in the Soldier's own outer battledress jacket, which makes him look even smaller and more vulnerable for reasons which escape the Soldier at the moment. 

That sense of shadowing, of the presence of something nebulous and distant but nonetheless vast, intensifies. He closes his eyes, not sure why he's doing it, and the shadow is _huge_ , the shadow goes back for

_decades_

some unknowable stretch of time, and with the image of his not-target still vivid in his mind he feels part of himself falling backwards into it. Most of his threat-warning responses flare, but the shadow somehow calms them. 

_Aspirin_ , a word comes to him out of the dimness, and for a few moments he can see this same face on the pillows of a much different bed, these same eyes looking up at him with the same recognition. _You would give him aspirin, for the fever, and_

No, he thinks, no, what is this, who is this _you_ , but he is overridden. 

_and boil water, make him breathe the steam, that helped_

Shut up! he tells his own head, which does not seem to be entirely his head anymore, and the memory--because that is what the shadow is, that is what the shadow is made up of, some vast distant store of memory he barely recognizes but is powerless to deny--carries on.

_and you worked double shifts all week to pay for the sulfa-whatever-it-was that the doctor said he had to have_

That crosspatches somewhere and the information pops up out of his regular recall, the encyclopedic background which he rarely consciously consults: _sulfapyridine, one of a class of antibacterials rendered largely obsolete with the development and mass production of the penicillin antibiotics toward the end of World War Two_ , which puts the shadow-memory in...the early 1940s? But this is not the early 1940s, this is--he queries his programming again--this is April of the year 2014.

He is already spiralling off down a self-referential feedback loop of confusion and illogic when the not-target coughs himself awake and squints up at him through sweat-darkened hair, and says, again: "Bucky?"

He grunts something vaguely negative. This does not stop his not-target, who sits up, clutching the straps and buckles of the Soldier's jacket around his thin shoulders, and says "You're real."

He blinks.

"You're... _not_ a hallucination," the not-target clarifies. 

As this is true, the Soldier simply nods. 

"Where...are we?"

That one is clear in his short-term programmed memory. "Washington, DC," he says. 

" _Washington?_ How'd I get to Washington? I was...on Flatbush Avenue. In Brooklyn. Then there was this kind of, of bright flash of light--" He loses the rest of the sentence in a fit of coughing that is obviously painful. It sounds to the Soldier as if he's attempting to expel his own lungs, which as far as he knows is not physically possible, and it doesn't seem to be stopping; and when the gasps between coughs take on a shrill, shrieky, desperate edge that vast shadow rises again in the back of his head and this time he lets it take control. It is so strange watching himself obey commands that are not part of his mission protocol that he does not object: one hand supports the not-target's

_Steve's_

chest while the other, the one that isn't metal, bends him over and rubs firmly with the heel of his palm between the sharp shoulderblades. Now he's talking, saying something, giving orders: instructing him on how to breathe, and the astonishing thing is that it seems to be working. Gradually the shrill gasps ease, deepen, and the coughing dies away, leaving the Soldier still rubbing his not-target's back and becoming uncomfortably aware of just how knobbly the spine beneath his fingers feels, how little there actually is of this person. 

"Thanks," he rasps, drooping exhausted and too hot against the Soldier's metal hand. "It _is_ you, Buck. What...what happened to you?"

"That's _not_ my _name_ ," says the Soldier, taking his hands away as soon as possible.

"James, is that better? James Buchanan Barnes." He starts to cough again, but manages to keep it under control. "What do you want to be called?"

It is not a question anybody has asked the Soldier in his short-term or programmed long-term recall. "I don't know," he says. _James Buchanan Barnes_ isn't right either, but it's not-right in a different way than _Bucky_.

"Well...when you figure it out...let me know, okay?" 

It has become more and more apparent over the past several minutes that the not-target does not actually appear to be _frightened_ of him, which is odd. Everything about him is more or less designed to provoke fear, from the metal arm to the unmarked black combat gear to the collection of weapons attached to his person, to the mask and goggles which he is not currently wearing. Probably it had been a mistake to take them off, but something

(the shadow)

had suggested it.

"What happened?" the not-target asks, and looks up at him. "Why am I here?"

"I don't know," he says again. "You are my mission, but you are also not the target I was assigned."

"Your mission?"

"Eliminate target: Captain America, alias Steven Grant Rogers."

" _What?_ " Wide, astonished blue eyes.

He repeats himself, irritably. 

"I'm..." Another brief coughing fit. "I'm Steve Rogers, but I don't know where you're getting this Captain America thing. They wouldn't let me enlist the last couple of times I tried, but I'm gonna keep trying."

"You're not my target," says the Winter Soldier again. "You don't fit the description. There has been a mistake."

"Captain _America_ ," Steve-Rogers the not-target says again, apparently having difficulty believing it. " _Captain_ America. Wow. I think I liked it better when you were a hallucination."

"I'm not a hallucination."

"Yeah, I got that. You're also not a hell of a conversationalist." He leans back against the pillows, rubbing at his chest. "Ow."

"You require maintenance."

"Maintenance?" Steve Rogers repeats. "Jesus, Buck, what are you, some kinda robot? --Sorry, sorry, I forgot, you don't want me to call you that."

"Maintenance is not in my scope of capability. You need--" He pauses, as the shadow-memory and his regular programming make and break contact. "--sulfapyridine."

"That is _really_ creepy, you know?" 

"What?"

"That thing you just did. Your eyes go weird and you, I dunno, it's like you're trying to tune some kinda wireless inside your head."

 _Wireless: archaic term for radio receiver._ The Soldier blinks. 

"My aunt had a parrot that did that," Steve Rogers says, sounding a little dreamy. 

"What?" he asks again. 

"That eye thing. Where your pupils get real big and then small and big again. _Really_ creepy on a person."

He appears to be going to sleep. The Soldier queries his available memory, including the shadow-cloud, for information contra-indicating this course of action, but Steve Rogers does not appear to have concussion, and the shadow informs him that rest is beneficial. "I will obtain sulfapyridine," he says. "Remain here until I return."

"You got it. Gonna grab some shut-eye."

He doesn't bother asking the shadow-memory what that means. Before he leaves, though, the Soldier pulls the bed's thin coverlet over Steve-Rogers-who-is-not-his-target, and turns down the bedside lamp.


End file.
